I founded Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc., an independent technology market intelligence company, in 2005. Previously, I was vice president of Client Computing at IDC, covering client PCs (desktop and mobile computers). Before that, I ran my own research and analysis firm, directed operations for a developer of multilingual text processing software, ran a technology analysis and publishing practice for a consulting company, managed international accounts for a data communications equipment manufacturer, and did new product development for a computerized trading network. I have published in a variety of forums and been quoted in a number of publications and other media outlets. I snagged a B.F.A. from Bennington College and an MBA from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. I am multilingual, world-traveled, and have bicycled over the Alps, but am now a family man.
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HP Endorsement Makes Google Chromebook Begin To Look Legit

Perhaps hoping to catch an updraft in the news cycle, Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced early Monday morning that it would field a Chromebook, Google’s laptop alternative that has been trying to gain traction in the market for a long time.

The Chromebook fits Google’s view of the world perfectly: it is entirely dependent on the cloud for full operation, but if you are ready to operate under the assumption that communications are fast, reliable, ubiquitous, and secure, you can benefit from having a fully fledged endpoint in any device at hand. With Google keeping track of your “state” at all times, you can access it from anywhere. For example, your bookmarks and browsing history come up on any Chrome browser you log into.

The problem with acceptance of Chromebooks in the past — a number of companies have tried them, Google itself and more recently, Acer, and Samsung — is that most people don’t believe that their communications are quite so perfect as yet.

True, if you live behind a corporate firewall, have fast wired connections, and not a tremendous need for performance (network lags can be detrimental to data-hog applications like video editing, software development, and 3D modeling), then you can make do with a Chromebook-like endpoint.

If you assume perfect communications, the Chromebook has many advantages. It supplies the user interface, but is otherwise stateless, and may not even store any data, perfect for task workers.

The following narrative illustrates how this thought process is playing out in one real company.

Recently, I spoke with the CEO of a small geographic application firm. He was evaluating his entire IT infrastructure. He was at a turning point, facing a major upgrade of Microsoft’s Office. He was trying to decide whether to go with Office 365, the rental version, which Microsoft is pushing pretty hard these days. To Microsoft, Office 365 represents a juicy potential annuity. He kept looking at that stack of license fees before him (he’s been buying Office for years, almost unthinking) and began asking himself whether he really needed every copy.

He assessed his staff, about 25 people, all of whom had Office, and realized that maybe five people actually needed it. The rest could make do with Google Docs, which, in any event, has interchange formats with Office and can pass files back and forth. Only five people were actually Office power users. The rest spent most of their time on email, the company’s own technical software, or applications that did not require heavy content creation.

He felt — as many other people I’ve spoken with do — that Microsoft applications offer far too many features and functions that no one needs or uses, and that a more streamlined productivity suite would be both better and cheaper.

Which led him to consider Microsoft Exchange as well. Microsoft’s email back end creates real lock on a lot of businesses. Not only do companies have to license Exchange, but the front end, Outlook, which is part of Office, as well. Although it is festooned with insanely detailed features, the Outlook-Exchange hegemony’s real grip on a company’s IT dollar is that it manages interchanges among multiple programs, notably email, calendar, and address book. You could argue one way or the other whether task list belongs in there, but the link between email, address book, and calendar is extremely tight.

Microsoft is able to favor its own email client, Outlook, by the close integration of these three functions. And, if you’re another company — like Apple or Asus — that needs to offer customers for its non-Windows endpoints a way to get rich data along with email, then you can license Exchange ActiveSync, a proprietary protocol, for a usurious amount of money, enough to discourage all but the best heeled companies (e.g., Apple) from taking the deal.

Take one and you have to take ‘em all, our CEO was thinking. And so he was wondering whether he could make the leap beyond Microsoft’s domain and still survive. And he was figuring that maybe he could. He would swing everybody over to Gmail, hosted in the cloud, get rid of his Exchange servers, dump Outlook, and supply Office to only those five employees who needed it. The result would produce thousands of dollars in annual savings.

My sense at the time of the interview was that he was 85% ready to go the cloud route. And many other companies are working their way through this same flow of logic and coming to the same conclusion. The cloud is ready for prime time.

Google, which, aside from the Chrome OS used on Chromebooks, supplies most of the platforms that might use ActiveSync (i.e., Android offerings from multiple vendors), recently declined to renew its ActiveSync license from Microsoft. How this will play out on the front end is unknown, but rather than supplying a kludgy front end to a broken back end, Google must see light at the end of the tunnel and believe it can supply both front and back ends and dispense with that piece of the Microsoft relationship entirely.

So, does HP’s fielding of this new client type herald a trend, or is it just another flailing move by a company that has made some notable missteps in the area of alternative clients in the past few years?

The HP Pavilion Chromebook features an Intel Celeron processor, signaling low cost and only enough processor performance for task workers. The 16GB solid-state drive points to two things: a decent user experience, since fetching data from a rotating drive slows down task completion more than anything else, and cloud storage, since 16GB isn’t enough to store a serious amount of user data. Ports include HDMI, USB 2.0, Ethernet, audio jack, up to 4 GB of memory, a removable battery, a webcam, and 100 GB of storage on Google Drive, free for two years. HP is offering the Chromebook in the United States starting at $330 on its Website, HPDirect.com.

HP is increasingly getting into cloud services itself, providing everything from consulting to hosting services and everything in between, including hybrid infrastructure management. To support this business, HP has for a long time supplied thin clients of various sorts, having acquired a thin-client business years ago along with the purchase of Compaq. The thin-client business has been good, but HP has had to “guarantee” the efficacy, as thin clients use “non-standard” (i.e., non-Microsoft) architecture. Now, with Google’s having standardized many of the services related to Chrome OS, the value proposition seems more solid.

I’d say HP’s timing is about right, and we can expect to see more of these things, as C-suite executives and corporate IT managers discover the benefit of segmenting their users into classes and providing much cheaper, cloud-based systems to as many workers as possible, saving the schmancy endpoints for the top executives and power users.

Disclosure: Endpoint has a consulting relationship with Hewlett-Packard.

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Between HP lining up with Google Chromebook and Apple with the iPad and Mac ProBook, Dell is dead. Dell may be going private, but it is really going into oblivion.

The final nail will be HP deciding to halt productioin of PCs — possible exception wil be producing scaled down (i.e., return to dumb terminal because all applications, files, and data stored on “the cloud” — resurrection of the mainframe) PCs for business and government.

It’s just another, let’s put it out there just so we can offer all of our customers a product with the HP name, even though we don’t make money on it, mentality. That’s what’s getting them into trouble. They want to offer everything to their customers, but it’s not a focused business model. IBM used to have that attitude, it got them into trouble and that’s why they got out of the PC industry and out of the printer industry.

These companies get so full of themselves, they forget that they can’t be everything to everyone. It catches up to them. Look at Cisco, they tried to make a tablet, it sucked, they dumped it, now they use iPads.

Roger, you are a consultant to HP, so you are automatically biased. I used to sell hardware and software to corporate and government accounts for several large resellers, so I have a background working with most of the top players since the mid 80′s. HP doesn’t do well with a lot these types of products. HP would be better off if they looked at each product they make and look at whether or not it is giving them decent margins, if not, then they should dump the product. Do have any idea how much money HP wastes in supporting these products? If they sell one of these Chromebooks and they get ONE support call during the warranty free tech support period. There goes any chance of profit. Personally, I don’t know how they can make a dime with these things. $330 RETAIL for a laptop? They have to be getting a lot of surplus chips/screens. They would have to make this thing for less than $200 to make any money. I don’t see how they can. The box it comes in probably costs them $25.

The theoretical concept is good; the user experience is horrendous. Far, far worse than the cripplingly slow netbooks that everyone bought several years ago that now collect dust. Until the Internet is fast, ubiquitous and (nearly) free, this is a niche product.

You are talking complete nonsense. It is a good thing that the CEOs of HP, Lenovo, Acer and Samsung are a bit more computer savy than you.

Chromebooks are actually far faster than netbooks or budget Windows laptops in the same price bracket, and also far faster than the sub $600 Windows 8 Pro tablets which are powered by the Atom Clover trail CPUs. In fact the 1.1 GHz dual core Celeron CPU in this HP Chromebook and the $199 Acer C7 Chromebook is twice as fast as on the sub $600 Windows 8 Surface Pro tablets. The GPUs in the sub $600 Atom powered Windows 8 pro tablets are pathetically slow and also a lot slower than the Chromebooks.

The $899 plus Windows 8 Pro ultrabook tablets are faster when running Windows applications, but they cost 4 times as much and are not significantly faster when running web apps, browsing the Internet, or playing media – one would certainly hope that they don’t play movies or music twice as fast :). However they are heavy, hot tablets with a keyboard and a fan with associated noise – you are better off with an ultrabook laptop or a Macbook quite frankly.

Chromebooks are already selling at 10% of total sales for Acer, PC World/Currys and others, and this is shortly after introduction with supply shortages and minimal advertising, and this should ramp up with volume production and greater awareness and availability – possibly up to 30% of PC/laptop sales. In reality, it is Windows 8 Pro and RT Tablets that are the niche products.

It’s too bad you can’t even spell “savvy” when you insult somebody, Siva. And your subsequent three paragraphs make a valid argument, which you undermine in your first by a lack of manners and sheer ignorance. There’s nothing more ironic that watching someone stretch to degrade someone else and make a fool of himself at the same time. Thank you for adding to our reading pleasure.